They said that the fjord ringing Arendelle was frozen all year.
Some people laughed at the silly rumor. Yes, it was cold up north, but it couldn't possibly be as cold that the water around the city could stay a frozen lake all year.
But it wasn't the only rumor about Arendelle. There were whispers swapped in marketplaces of a queen with snowy hair and powers of ice. Nonsensical gossip about magic and winter in summer and frozen hearts were common themes murmured about in town squares and at parties, but many people brushed off these rumors, no matter how many merchants who came back from Arendelle insisted urgently that yes, indeed, the fjord was frozen solid, even in high summer.
And eventually the conversation moved onto much safer topics.
Queen Elsa of Arendelle, when possible, liked to take walks along the banks of the fjord.
She would walk serenely from her palace across Arendelle, her hair neatly twisted back into an elegant bun, and wave politely to her people, wearing the same fixed smile as he did so. When she finally reached the lip of the fjord, she would walk along it for a bit, glittering shards of frost scattering on the ground wherever she stepped, and then she would sit down by the fjord and settle her feet on the thick ice that coated it. Sometimes she would let her hair down into a long white braid and stare out at the fjord and look at the path of snowflakes that she had imprinted into it when she had fled from her coronation, or look at the looming purple mountains in the distance and think of those lovely few days up there, alone and free to unleash her magic however she wanted, back when her magic had been beautiful….
And sometimes she would see the faintest blue-white silhouettes frozen eternally out on the fjord, but she would blink hard several times and they would be gone, if they had ever been there.
Your sister is dead! Because of you!
King Benedikt of the Southern Isles had not showed any clear emotion when she explained what happened to his younger brother. He had simply pressed his lips into a thin, white line and nodded and an odd flicker of emotion flashed in his blank green eyes (so similar to Hans's) when she mentioned what Hans had tried to do. Elsa believed that he would have tried to push further had he not seen the ice crawling on the legs of the desk and known he was walking on shaky grounds. So he had stood up and, when she refused a handshake, bowed to her and walked out of the study.
And that was the last she'd seen of the Southern Isles, and to be honest, the last she'd wanted to see. She wanted no more reminders about that awful day, and more ambassadors from the Southern Isles would just be rubbing it in her face (the fact that she already knew)—that she was a monster.
Your sister is dead because of you, he'd said, and the moment the words had left his lips her insides had seemed to freeze and all the hope that was left in her extinguished like a sputtering candle surrendering to an icy breeze. Anna was dead, she had thought, and had collapsed to the ground, the storm swirling to a sudden, frozen halt. Anna was dead, and then she had heard the soft shing of metal and had instinctively thrown her hand out, a wave of cold coursing from her fingers—
Not being able to bear the pain of staying in her old bedroom or moving to the bedroom she and her sister used to share, Elsa usually did her work in her study. She worked relentlessly almost twenty four seven in order to wall out any traitorous thoughts of frozen hearts and frozen fjords and frozen sisters—
"Tea, your Highness?"
Elsa jumped in her chair in surprise, not expecting Kai, and felt the ice crackle at her fingertips and frost over the side of her desk. But, pretending like Kai's eyes weren't following the progress of the ice over the desk, she took a deep breath and smiled graciously, like the good girl her parents had trained her to be. "Yes, Kai. Thank you." She took the cup in trembling fingers, proud of herself for not freezing it, and took a sip even though the liquid was scalding. Much like she was unable to feel cold, she found herself resistant to burns too.
Kai smiled hesitantly at her back and bowed his way out the door, softly closing it with a slight click.
Anna would hate that door closed, Elsa thought for some reason, and it was one of those thoughts that simultaneously made a lump of concealed emotions swell in her throat but also painted a feeling of something resembling…warmth in her heart. Making a mental note to remind Kai to leave the door open from now on, Elsa stood from her desk with her tea and walked to the window where she could oversee Arendelle in all its entirety. As she took gentle sips of her tea and watched the children play in the town square and the women do their laundry and cook their meals for tonight's dinner and the men talk among themselves and guffaw at their own jokes as they lifted up firewood to carry inside the house, Elsa wished, not for the first time, that she could be down there with them. It was a very Anna wish, she thought, her chest constricting slightly.
Against herself, Elsa's eyes flashed in the direction of the eternally frozen fjord, and, once again, could swear she could make out two frozen silhouettes. She bit her lip and took another draught of tea to give herself something else to think about, because it had almost been a year since the incident, hadn't it?
Petals of frost began to curl across the previously steaming tea in her trembling hands.
Glaring down at the cup, Elsa gingerly set it back on the desk. Lifting her pale, moon-white hands that had frozen the teacup (and Arendelle, and the fjord, and valuable hearts) and inspecting them, she briefly remembered that day, and how she could feel the cold stream of ice rushing uncontrollably out of her fingers, and how she could have done nothing to stop it—
Flinging her arm out instinctively, a small cry as a sword clattered with a metallic clang onto the thick, frozen ice—
A roar of sudden ice slammed into the window and Elsa practically threw herself backwards, ramming her back into the desk and nearly knocking the whole thing over.
One year.
Elsa closed her eyes and tilted her head up, feeling the ice behind her eyelids melt enough to drip cold water down her cheeks.
—When she'd heard the soft but alarming shing of metal, out of pure, overwhelming instinct, she had thrown her arm out. The ice in her veins had somehow escaped her enough to rush through her fingers and shoot somewhere in a direction behind her.
And a sword hit the ice beside her. There was a soft, startled cry, and then nothing.
Elsa, staring breathlessly at the sword that was now tracked with intricate frosty designs, pivoted slightly enough so that she could see Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, completely engulfed in a sheet of freezing ice of her own creation, his face frozen in a predatory grin forever as Elsa's ice froze him on that fjord that terrible, horrible, awful day.
"Elsa-a-a-a!"
Her younger sister's voice trilled out into the empty hallway of the palace, and thirteen-year-old Elsa instinctively fought the gloves on. Gloves on at all times around Anna, was another one of her parents' rules. And as Elsa still heard a five-year-old cry out 'catch me' whenever she looked at Anna, she wasn't likely to forget that rule any time soon.
"Elsa, you missed a great dinner! We had turkey and ham and…and steak…and royal stuff! But anyway, at the end the chef served the biggest, most deliciousest chocolate cake you've ever seen in your whole life, and it was so good I had to save some for you."
A crumpled napkin loosely folded around a small slab of chocolate cake was squashed underneath Elsa's door.
"And…I know it's kinda small, and it's a bit squashed…and, okay, fine, I ate some of it. But only a little bit, I swear. The rest is good. Do you still like chocolate? You always loved it when we used to—"
Anna's voice trailed off and every fiber inside of Elsa itched to throw the door open and welcome her sister in after these lonely five years so that they could eat cake and build snowmen together, but—
Catch me!
She couldn't.
"Elsa? Why won't you come out?"
Conceal it…don't feel it.
The floorboards sighed outside as Anna shifted uncertainly from foot to foot, hesitantly lifting up her hand so that she could rap on the door and ask the age-old question:
Do you want to build a snowman?
As a frozen Hans towered above her and leered down at her, Elsa unsteadily wobbled to her feet, not knowing what she was going to do but knowing she wanted to do something, anything, to make the icicles piercing her heart melt.
Your sister is dead because of you.
Queen Elsa of Arendelle swayed back and forth on her feet, but eventually tottered forward.
Your sister is dead.
Tatters of a previously ice-white dress trailed behind her as she walked, onetwothree, onetwothree, out into the frozen storm, wondering what she would find out there.
As much as she hated to admit it, Elsa did feel a bit safer in the wintertime. There was a curtain of snow to hide her curse's every traitorous action, and a mirror of ice stretching across Arendelle reflecting her perfect image back at her, a politely smiling girl with frost-colored hair elegantly done up in a queenly fashion and hiding the monster beneath.
Sometimes Elsa looked out at the Arendelle in winter and thought that this is what Arendelle would have looked like forever if it hadn't thawed. And her winter had thawed. Eventually. It took a couple days of her immense grief, it seemed, to break the ice. Anna, however, she thought drily sometimes, would have said it was love…
(But she always did away with such thoughts, because thinking of her sister sometimes made ice spikes sprout in the corner of the room, effectively trapping her in a cage of her own constrained emotions.)
So she did her best to forget that day. She attended dull meetings and ignored the flurries of snow dancing on her fingertips underneath the table. She listened contentedly to the people's requests, even though they were forced to stand on the opposite side of the throneroom as her, for the ice was always buzzing underneath her skin and she could never risk another accident. Sometimes, when she was in her study, she'd find herself dawdling and staring out the window at a horizon of craggy mountains and wondering if a certain Ice Palace was still there…but to go to the North Mountain would be to cross the fjord, and she didn't think she could ever handle something like that.
And sometimes, in those strange dreamy hours between consciousness and sleep, Elsa would find herself daydreaming about snowmen blossoming out of the ground at a wave of her hands, at a staircase crafted out of ice crystals swirling off of the ground for her to climb, of snowflakes dancing in the palm of her hand, of an ice palace fountaining into unique wintery beauty…
Elsa's dress was in tatters and her hair was wisping out of her braid. She was a mess, and she knew it, even though she didn't quite know where she was going. Wrenching violent breaths from the freezing air and gasping as she tried to wall out the Southern Isles prince's words, Elsa staggered on uncertain, wobbly feet in an unforeseen direction.
"'Scuse me?"
When Elsa heard the small, childlike words, she felt the ice immediately prickle at her fingers. Keeping her back turned to the voice, she took a deep breath and tried to call back the rush of ice to her frozen heart. Turning around, she faced a small child with a mop of mousy ginger hair and bright, inquisitive blue eyes. If he'd been accompanied by his mother, she was certain that he'd have been scolded and told to bow and remember his manners when talking to a queen, something that all the other mothers had told their children when they had skipped up to her in the middle of a marketplace. But he seemed to have lost his mother for that day.
Elsa was no good with children. It had been thirteen years since her last encounter with a child, and of course….well, she knew how that had ended.
But she forced a smile to her face. "How can I help you?"
The small boy gazed up at her with solemn blue eyes, not speaking for a couple of beats. Then he opened his mouth long enough to say, "Are you really the queen?"
"Yes, of course."
"But you haven't got a crown."
"…I lost mine."
"You lost it?" The boy's light brown eyebrows furrowed over his eyes. "That doesn't seem really re'ponsible."
Elsa didn't bother trying to correct him. She simply dealt with him the only way she knew how to deal with children. She laced her fingers in front of her and smoothed down her skirt and asked primly, "Where is your mother?"
The boy slumped at the question he'd been hoping to avoid. Idly picking at a piece of lint on his tunic, he mumbled something indistinct about 'doing laundry.'
"Hmmm. Well, maybe we should let her know where you are?"
"I don't think just yet," the child said seriously, looking up at her straight in the eye. "I've only been out of my house for five minutes, and I haven't even done any proper exploring yet."
Elsa was tempted to dismiss the boy, brush him away and send him back to his mother without a second thought, but then her eyes filtered over his coloring and ginger hair and blue-green eyes and she realized with an almost-awful constriction in her throat that he is Anna, and she wasn't sure how she should feel about this.
Even after almost a year and a half now, she really wasn't sure how to feel.
"Perhaps you can stay out for a couple more minutes," Elsa agreed, and delight immediately ignited on the boy's face.
"My name is Anton," he happily volunteered, beaming up at her. "And you're Queen Elsa of Arendelle."
"I am."
He gazed up at her in wide-eyed, almost troubled curiosity for a couple of moments before, turning his head side to side to make sure that nobody else in the marketplace is questioning the five-year-old boy speaking to a queen, he stretched his hand out to her and beckoned.
Choosing to humor him, Elsa knelt down onto the cobblestoned street and flicked aside a piece of white hair so that Anton could lean in and fold his hands around his mouth and whisper:
"Do you have magic?"
Instinctively, Elsa jerked away, as she had always been taught to—as her parents had trained her to do. But even as she planned to walk away to the safety of her palace—to her closed door—Anna's blue eyes pulled reluctant answers out of her.
"I have a curse," she responded simply.
"I think I would rather have magic."
A winter wonderland inside of a ballroom. Skating on smooth lengths of ice with snowmen. A little girl's delighted giggles as they slid down a giant slide made out of snow, purely for them to play in…
"When I was younger," Elsa said softly, almost to herself, "I used to think it was magic."
Anton stared openly up at her, working his jaw as if he was thinking, and she was expecting a question like 'What happened?' or something similar, but what comes out is, "Can you do it now?"
Elsa's fingernails immediately bit into the soft dough of her palm.
"I don't think so."
"But why not?"
Why not, indeed? Because those were Anna's eyes looking up at her, pleading her, asking her if she wanted to build a snowman, and she had never been able to say no to Anna…at least, not before she turned eight.
And so Elsa held out her palm and savored the look on Anna's—Anton's face as light, snowy mist began to drizzle in the air above her palm. Remember, she thought as she flexed her fingers, trying to recall the feeling of glittering snow streaming through her veins, hers to control, the feeling she'd been familiar with as a child, the feeling she had reunited with on that northern mountain high above Arendelle—
A simply white snowball swirled into being, floating an inch or two in the air above her hand. Snowflakes tracked themselves into the smooth white surface, and small cold winds played on her fingers.
Remember.
"Oh," the boy breathed, his eyes taking on a paler hue as he gazed reverently at the snowball. He instantly reached out with small, grubby fingers to touch it, but when he saw her looking at him, he immediately retracted his hand.
"You can," she said simply.
Looking at her with Anna's wide eyes, Anton reached out with trembling fingers to cup the snowball in his hand, to scoop it out of thin air. When he took his hands away, the ball stayed hovering in the air, no visible imprints of his fingers to be seen on the once-again smooth surface.
Do you want to build a snowman?
She asked the boy, who will probably be the closest thing she'll ever have to Anna, the very same question. And the happy light in Anna's blue eyes as he agreed was almost worth all the previous year and a half's worth of loneliness.
Almost.
"…She returned from the mountains, weak and cold! She said that you froze her heart—I tried to save her, but it was too late!"
Too late?
Too late?
What did too late mean?
"Her skin was ice, her hair turned white!"
The white streak seeping down through Anna's strawberry-blonde locks, as it had done thirteen years ago in that ice ballroom…
"Your sister is dead!"
No.
"Because of YOU!"
NO.
The storm somehow pushed Elsa onto her knees. And thirteen years of isolation wouldn't let her get up.
Today Anna would have been nineteen.
She would have blown out nineteen dripping candles and made a wish, probably something to do with snowmen and sisters. Once she'd confided through a keyhole that she wished for that every year. She would have eaten chocolate cake until she was fit to burst, and she would have somehow prodded Elsa into having a snowball fight with her.
And she would have been happy. She would have invited all of the servants, all of the friends she would have made in Arendelle, and had a huge party, even bigger than Elsa's coronation. Anna would have befriended everybody, because that was the kind of person she was.
But Anna wasn't here. It was only Elsa, with nineteen upright, too-perfect candles on a sad heap of chocolate cake in the middle of the forlorn kitchen.
She slid one slice of cake onto her own plate. She glanced at the empty plate and empty chair at the seat across from her, and raised her wine glass.
"Happy Birthday, Anna," she said, and then drank.
After a minute or so of walking numbly around in the frozen landscape, Elsa thought she saw a glitter of something blue-white a couple feet away from her.
She began to stagger towards it.
It was Anna's birthday, and this time of year always struck up conflicting, unfamiliar emotions in her, swirling inside like anxious flurries. For Anna had once told her (through the keyhole, of course) that while she loved her bike and the fairytale books that Mama and Papa had given her, what she most wanted was for her big sister to visit her, just for a couple of minutes.
It was Anna's birthday, and that present was thirteen years overdue.
Conceal, don't feel, Elsa, her parents' voices sang from the portrait hanging in the front hallway as Elsa paced back and forth in front of it. Conceal it, don't feel it. Don't let it show.
But Anna had never bothered to conceal her emotions, Elsa thought as patterns of ice spiraled out from the tips of her shoes. She had never needed to. Anna had been an open book and proud. She had never had to hide like Elsa had, and scorned the idea of backing off from a challenge.
She had scorned the idea of letting your fears take advantage of you.
When Elsa saw what the blue-white glitter was, she opened her mouth and a soft sort of keen dripped out. For some strange reason, her legs stopped working, and she had to hold onto the statue for fear of collapsing and never being able to get back up again.
And hadn't that been what Elsa had done that day on the frozen fjord? Let her fear take advantage of her?
Hadn't her fear been what had whipped the storm that had gathered inside her for thirteen years into a fury?
"It gets a little lonely," Anna had once said through a closed white door. "All these empty rooms…just watching the clock tick by!"
She wondered, sometimes, if Anna was lonely in her eternal spot on the fjord.
"I'm right out here for you," Anna had whispered to her closed door on that fateful night.
But when had she been there for Anna?
Maybe she could give Anna the present she'd always wanted. Just for that day, both for Anna and for the purpose of conquering her fears.
Don't let them in, her parents' small voices whispered from a portrait hiding behind the dark silky curtain that had been drawn over them the day they'd died.
Don't let them know.
But Anna was her sister.
And she owed her a present after thirteen years of missed birthdays.
Before she could fully process it, she had pushed herself to her feet and began practically storming out of the hall, out the doors and out the gates and into the blazing summer sunlight. Many people, including little Anton, stopped to greet the queen, but she was in a hurry. Small ice crystals crusted themselves into the forms of footsteps as she hurried across the town, and snow flurries swirled after her in her haste.
And suddenly, after about two years of wanting to avoid it as best she could, it was suddenly incredibly, life-threateningly important that Elsa run out to the fjord as fast as possible—
"Do the magic, do the magic!"
But ever since they both had been imprisoned inside the tendrils of her frozen heart, the snowy magic had become her winter curse.
And ever since the curse had gotten out of control, had dashed that white lock into her sister's hair, it had become her burden, her cage—
When she reached the bank of the fjord, she didn't even hesitate. She simply hit the ice and started running. Past the bridge of snowflakes that she had crossed as she'd fled from her disgrace at her coronation. Past the frosted-over ships that had long been trapped in the fjord for two full years. Past the ice statue that was once Hans Westergaard, and she was tempted to stop and inspect it with morbid fascinated, because her blue-white ice had leached out the color of fifty percent of his skin, and his once green eyes had turned the dull blue of ice…
Hang o-on….
Catch me!
….Wait! Slow down!
ANNA!
….And then Anna.
She had found her sister just like that, a pure ice statue, the brilliant blue of her eyes now the dark, dull blue of thick ice. Her hands were extended in front of her, her braids flying behind her, frozen forever in a running position as she fought against the ice to get between Elsa and the sword. If she had, Elsa would wonder only later, would things have been different?
But it didn't matter, because either way, Anna would be a motionless statue drowning in Elsa's curse, and either way, Elsa would have collapsed onto her icy shoulders, burying her face into her sister's once soft strawberry-blond hair, and feeling great heaving sobs tear through her body with wracking shudders—
She stared openly at the frozen statue of her little sister for a couple of minutes for the first time since that terrible, awful day. At first, she could do nothing but simply stand there and drink in the fact that her sister was now no more than an empty, lifeless husk—something that Elsa made out of her.
Then, feeling brave, she reached out with trembling fingers to touch Anna's shoulder and for a fleeting second she expected all the ice to flutter away, the snowflake patterns to dwindle into nothing and for Anna's hair to darken and turn red again, but nothing happened.
"I'm sorry, Anna," was all she could say, her fingers now stroking through Anna's stiff, icy hair. "I am so sorry."
The ice statue that was no longer Anna didn't say anything.
"She ran away from me," the blonde ice harvester would explain later, his eyes rimmed red and his face unshaven and peppered with blonde stubble. "She was trying to save you."
Tears crystallized in Elsa's ice-blue eyes.
"Do you think she could have lived if she'd not tried to save me?"
"Anna?"
"Maybe. Yes. But that…that wouldn't have been Anna."
A harsh sobfell from her mouth, and moon-white arms wound around Anna's frozen neck. Elsa leaned her head on her sister's shoulder, just like Anna used to do to her when they were children.
"Elsa? Do you want to build a snowman?"
Elsa repeated the words out loud, looking Anna straight in her icy, lifeless eyes, pronunciating them clearly and precisely and meaning them most of all.
"Anna?"
The quiet rush of the wind on the icy fjord was the only one to answer her.
"Do you want to build a snowman?"
The wind kicked up on the fjord, slightly rustling her dress on the ice behind her. Elsa kept her arms around Anna's neck, feeling like if she movedd then she might fall to her feet, like she'd done on that terrible, awful day, and never get up.
"I love you," she said, and the words were so solid and firm and certain that Elsa realized that, even after thirteen years of trying to refuse emotion, the words were true.
But Anna did not say it back.
Elsa's arms somehow slipped off of Anna's frozen neck and her knees weakened like fractured slabs of ice and suddenly she was lying on the ground in a very Anna-like position, her braid cascading out from her head on the ice and her dress wrinkled and wet and ruined, looking up at that grayish sky and and feeling like she could lie at Anna's feet forever and never move, just listening for the slightest hint that her sister was somehow still alive and well.
Please, I know you're in there…
Elsa thought she heard a small creak of ice somewhere beneath her ear, but she chose to listen to Anna singing her song in her head once more.
…People are asking where you've been. They say have courage—
The ice sighed, as if someone were stepping onto it.
And I'm trying to. I'm right out here for you…just let me in…
Elsa could swear that there was a presence out on the ice with her, somebody standing somewhere above her.
We only have each other. It's just you and me…what are we going to do?
The girl knelt down besides her older sister.
Do you want to build a snowman?
"Of course I do," Anna said.
And somewhere beneath Elsa, the fjord began to thaw.
I think I'm incapable of writing anything other than sad things.
Thank you for reading! Also, a tiny, tiny bit of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows somehow wormed its way in there...